Buddhist Teachings

Join Buddhist teacher, artist, and author Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche at the META Center in New York City next week for "Uncommon Kindness," a three-part series of meditations to awaken the heart. Running the evenings of Wednesday through Friday (10/10-10/12), the teachings will show us how to overcome our limited focus of self-concern, giving us the tools to forge lives filled with empathy and kindness.
Until then, have a read of Pema Chödrön's latest Tricycle article “The Fundamental Ambiguity of Being Human.” Pema is a current student of Rinpoche's.
Get the details and purchase tickets here.
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Attention, New Yorkers! This Sunday, Dr. Reginald "Reggie" Ray, co-founder of the Dharma Ocean Foundation and senior teacher (Acharya) in the Shambhala tradition, will be giving teachings and leading a meditation on bodhicitta at Insight Meditation Center in New York City. Reggie will speak about the centrality of bodhicitta to the Mahayana and Vajrayana paths.
For details, check out the flyer below.
See you there!
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Eleven years ago the United States was shook to its core by a terrorist attack of unprecedented scale. At the time, in response to the tragic events, Tricycle released in its next issue a special section—"September 11, Practices and Perspectives"—that shared Buddhist teachings on how to face the nation's acute suffering with patience and compassion. You can read "September 11, Practices and Perspectives," here.
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Our friends over at Buddhist Global Relief, an all-volunteer organization started by students of Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi that is dedicated to combating chronic hunger and malnutrition, have a lot coming up in the next couple of months. (You can learn more about Buddhist Global Relief by visiting their website here or reading about them in Tricycle here.) Primarily, it's time to sign up for one of Buddhist Global Relief's Walks of Compassion, which raise money for programs that aim to alleviate hunger in the modern world. Here's the schedule:
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The Kalama Sutta has become among Western Buddhists one of the most frequently cited scriptures in the Pali canon. But usually only a specific section is quoted. This section portrays Buddhism as being almost a precursor of European Enlightenment thought, which is to say, it is used to confirm characteristic Western attitudes as being intrinsically in line with the teachings of Buddhism. But it is misleading to present this as the whole message of the sutta, as is evident when one reads the whole thing.
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In a rare burst of creative energy, the Tricycle team went a step further when it came to illustrating Thanissaro Bhikkhu's article "Lost In Quotation," a piece about what we miss when we don't read the whole sutta. We actually created the art ourselves:
We know. Artistic genius.
In all seriousness, the amount of "fake Buddha quotes" in circulation, especially on the Internet, is staggering. Those Post-It note quotes might look nice on your refrigerator and in your day-planner, but they can actually be problematic. People end up formulating their perception of what the Buddha said based on these snapshot quotes that are often totally made up.
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